Course Learning Outcomes | Aug 2021

2. Course Learning Outcomes

Ultimately, every aspect of our teaching practice is directed toward what we want our students to learn. The 2020-21 CRC developed this revised list of student learning outcomes for Composition 1 in light of its commitment to advancing equity and updating the approach the course takes to writing instruction.

We’ve organized the course learning outcomes (CLOs) under four dimensions of learning that take place in Composition 1.

I. Rhetorical knowledge | Rhetorical knowledge is the ability to analyze the contexts, audiences, and power relationships in texts. In taking an equity-focused orientation to rhetorical knowledge, we seek to decenter White dominant rhetorical habits and to, instead, equip students with the tools to understand how various types of texts employ rhetorical strategies in different ways to work in different contexts.

II. Critical writing & reading | Critical writing & reading is the practice of deeply listening, analyzing, synthesizing, interpreting, and evaluating ideas, information, situations, and texts in order to better understand their implications and to move beyond facile, instrumental habits of text consumption and production.

III. The craft of writing & reading | Writers use numerous strategies, or processes, to conceptualize, invent, develop, and refine projects. Those processes are flexible and seldom linear: writers adapt their composing processes to different contexts and occasions. Attention to the labor and craft of writing is an essential component of an equity-oriented approach to teaching writing courses.

IV. Conventions of writing & reading | Writers develop awareness of how various types of conventions—including mechanics, usage, spelling, and citation practices, as well as content, style, organization, graphics, and document design—are choices that are historical and political in nature. In our equity orientation, we seek to help students develop a critical awareness so that they may make strategic choices regarding the implementation of these customs in the texts they produce. In our approach, we fully support students’ right to their own Englishes, their right to choose to both follow and break conventions, and their right to pride in their own language habits.

The CLOs listed below are the official CLOs for all sections of Composition 1 (Eng 12 and Eng 12A0) and, as such, must be included on all syllabi for these courses. They are set by departmental governance, via the Curriculum Committee and via Departmental vote, and may not be modified by individual instructors.

After reading through these CLOs, we invite teachers to engage in the heuristic process we offer on the equity awareness page of this guide.

Course Learning Outcomes for Composition 1

I. Rhetorical knowledge| Students in Composition 1 will learn to:

- - Apply basic rhetorical concepts in reading and composing texts. Examples of commonly considered essential concepts might include the following: text (logos), author (ethos), audience (pathos), purpose (telos), setting/exigence (kairos).
  - Compose in several genres in order to understand how conventions and linguistic habits shape readers’ and writers’ practices, purposes, and expectations.

II. Critical writing & reading| Students in Composition 1 will learn to:

- - Identify, through careful reading and listening, the relationships between assertion and evidence, patterns of organization, and strategic language choices.
  - Locate and evaluate (for credibility, sufficiency, accuracy, currency, relevance, etc.) primary and secondary research materials.
  - Use strategies—such as interpretation, synthesis, response, critique, and design/redesign—to compose texts that integrate the writer’s ideas with those from other texts.

III. The craft of writing & reading| Students in Composition 1 will learn to:

- - Develop a writing project through multiple iterations and document one’s thinking and choices between those iterations.
  - Select and use strategies for reading, drafting, reviewing, collaborating, revising, rewriting, rereading, and editing; make and use these choices with reference to the genre and medium/technology of writing projects.
  - Reflect on one’s own development and change as a writer and one’s emerging knowledge about the craft of writing.

IV. Conventions of writing & reading| Students in Composition 1 will learn to:

- - Practice in self-conscious ways the dominant, and one’s own existing, linguistic conventions through the work of writing.
  - Apply dominant citation conventions in one’s own writing and reflect on why these conventions exist and how they are used in different genres and contexts.